This months IEEE Spectrum Magazine is better than it has been in quite a while. The theme of the issue is engineering the megacity. For some reason though, in the front of the issue they included a report about how India will spend $30 Billion on its military. With this amount in mind, I read through the rest of the issue which includes quite a few statistics about Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Mumbai is the only city in India that has 24/7 electrical power. However, the electrical load is growing faster than than generation and transmission, and it will probably be experiencing blackouts in the near future. As you can see from this picture, it appears that they have a long way to go on establishment and enforcement of a national electric code. There are some more scary wiring pictures here and here . There is a decent article about the current state of the electrical system in india here.
A few other statistics are scattered throughout the issue. A few were notable:
- 99 percent of homes in Mumbai have access to electricity, 82 percent have access to piped water, only 41 percent have access to sewers.
- Mumbai has 5 million slum dwellers.
- 56 percent of India’s urban population live in slums.
Some more pictures and statistics are here.